I have no doubt that when the time finally comes, South Africans will put on a state funeral for Nelson Mandela that will make those Catholics put on for dead popes seem modest and irreverent. And the least of it will be the who’s who among world leaders queuing up to pay their last respects.
But this will stand in glaring contrast to the way these same South Africans have disrespected him during these last years and days of his life. And it is particularly disheartening that his family members are responsible for most of this disrespect.
Here, for example, is what I felt moved to write earlier this year in “Is Nothing Sacred? ‘Being Mandela’ – The Reality-TV Show?” The iPINIONS Journal, March 18, 2013:
I wonder why the granddaughters of Nelson Mandela, easily the most revered and dignified politician in the world today, would want to sully his good name by having the Mandelas try to keep up with the Kardashians…
I can think of no socially redeeming value in the Mandelas airing their dirty laundry on TV… And God forbid they cast Mandela as a feature player (in Weekend-At-Bernie’s fashion) in their faux story lines to boost ratings.
And here’s what I felt moved to follow up with just weeks ago in “It’s Time To Let Mandela Go,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 10, 2013:
My abiding regard for him has compelled me to repeatedly lament the way everyone from family members to politicians have been treating him more like a national mascot than an elder statesman in recent years…
I am among those hoping – not necessarily for him to die, but for him to be spared any more indignities…
So here’s to letting Mandela go.
Alas, it seems Mandela is proving too great a self-aggrandizing prop for some to let him go. Which brings me to his ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela–Mandela. Because nobody has done more to bask in the god-like reverence that has attended the ongoing, worldwide vigil for him than she.
Most notable in this respect is the way she has assumed the role of protecting him from photo opportunists like a lioness protecting her cub from mercenary poachers.
This was on full display just days ago when she publicly chastised no less a person than South African President Jacob Zuma. His offense was publishing pictures of his visit in April with Mandela – when the former president was recuperating at home after his latest rush to hospital:
I honestly cannot put in words how hurt the family was. It was one of the most insensitive things for anyone to have done.
(Winnie Mandela, SA Sunday Times, June 30, 2013)
But, demonstrating that she is truly no respecter of persons, she did not even give President Obama a chance to offend (her?) the way Zuma did, For, according to the June 28 edition of the Wall Street Journal, even though Obama went out of his way to state that, “I don’t need a photo op,” Winnie still prevented him from visiting Mandela (who is now back in hospital) during his state visit last week (June 28-30).
The problem of course is that, in playing this overzealous role (as mother protector and devoted spouse), she has relegated Mandela’s current wife, Graca Machel, to a role as little more than hospital bed nurse.
Just years ago one would have been forgiven for thinking that Winnie would be praying now for Mandela to hasten to his grave. After all, here is the (woman-scorned) way she was publicly damning him as a money-grubbing sellout back then – when he had already withdrawn from public life and was in no position to defend himself:
This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family. You all must realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died.
Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a young revolutionary but look what came out.
Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically we are still on the outside. The economy is very much “white”.
I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel with his jailer de Klerk. Hand in hand they went. Do you think de Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed.
Mandela is now like a corporate foundation. He is wheeled out globally to collect the money.
(London Evening Standard, March 8, 2010)
In “Nelson Mandela Is a Traitor and an Albatross?!” The iPINIONS Journal, March 9, 2010, I duly criticized Winnie as not just a Peter the denier, but a Judas the betrayer for unleashing this wholly unwarranted diatribe against him.
Not to mention that Mandela found her conviction for kidnapping, as well as credible accusations of everything from serial infidelity to embezzlement, so disloyal and “insensitive” that he not only divorced her in 1992 (just two years after getting out of prison), but also fired her from her deputy Cabinet post in the ANC.
Yet today Winnie would have the world believe that none of this ever happened, and that she and Graca are simply Mandela’s two loving and devoted wives – as if, like Zuma, he is a practicing polygamist. Whereas nothing could be further from the truth – notwithstanding that tribal custom entitles him to have more than one wife … from his tribe.
This is why I am so stupefied that most South Africans do not find the public persona she’s affecting ironic, if not a hypocritical national disgrace.
Meanwhile, in that infamous Zuma photo op, which is the last image we have of Mandela, it looks like his spirit left his body long ago. But this has not stopped his loved ones from continually remarking on what a fighter he is – as if this were ever in doubt. Except that it seems distressingly clear that it is not he who is fighting to stay as much as it is his loved ones who are refusing to let him go.
This was brought into sad relief when Winnie insisted just days ago that they would rather keep Mandela in hospital on life support (in a vegetative state) than let him die naturally. Notwithstanding it being a matter of public record that spending his last days in his ancestral home of Qunu was for him a consummation devoutly to be wished….
Which brings me to this last, grave spectacle:
While Nelson Mandela is fighting for his life in a Pretoria hospital, members of his family are fighting each other, in a feud which is being played out in lurid details in the local media.
Several family members have taken his eldest grandson, Mandla, to court in a bid to exhume three of the former president’s children, so they can be reburied in the family graveyard in Qunu, where Mr Mandela wants to be laid to rest.
And the battle over the exhumations is a sign of much deeper divisions within Mr. Mandela’s large and complex family – his three wives, six children, 17 grandchildren and 12 surviving great-grandchildren.
(BBC, July 1, 2013)
Mind you, the only reason for this dispute is that he who controls the Mandela graveyard controls the tourist dollars they all expect will come from pilgrimages to it. Add to this spectacle the way his family members had already begun fighting over his financial legacy and you’ll get a small sense of why I fear that, after he’s dead and buried, it will still be a long time before Mandela can finally rest in peace.
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It’s time…